Thursday extracts: A Bon(e)fire

Zozobra started to growl. It was like the deep noise an old man makes when woken from a good nap. It was like the sound of an engine revving on a Dodge Charger. The growling didn’t stop.



Lucy shifted from foot to foot in the dark, not sure what to expect next. She had to admit she was a little bit anxious. She had never been to Zozobra before, but then she’d only lived in Santa Fe for a year and a half. Her boss, Harold Richards, who had been city editor at the Capital Tribune for the past twenty years, described it as “a bunch of people standing around while they torch a big puppet.” She hadn’t believed him at first. It had sounded so silly—and so pagan in a city as Catholic as Santa Fe, whose very name means “Holy Faith.”


Still, Zozobra had been a Santa Fe tradition for more than eighty years. It was the opening salvo in the fiesta party arsenal. The actual Fiesta de Santa Fe didn’t begin until tomorrow. Like any good Catholic celebration, the weekend started with the fires of salvation and ended in acts of sin. Tonight was about redemption. Tomorrow was about partying your ass off.
 
The Bone Fire  Christine Barber  2010 Minotaur Books (Thomas Dunne) e-edition
 

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I reviewed this book yesterday so I don't want to waste too much time explaining the plot.  This is from very early in Chapter 1 - the set up for the rest of the novel. It turns out there's a child's skull inside the burning effigy and it starts a major murder investigation. Getting essential information into a story without losing the flow is a key skill. I admire the way Barber sums up all you need to know in the phrase “a bunch of people standing around while they torch a big puppet” and how she introduces it. The rest is pure atmosphere.
 

3 word monday (only it's Wednesday): Disguise

“Perfect disguise”, Amanda said to her reflection in the cheval mirror. “No-one will recognise you.” The wig made her head look like a coconut and the mouth was a delightful touch. She gnashed her teeth and pulled back her lips, gurning at herself to get a better look. Yellow and crooked: what they call ‘English teeth’ in the US. Then, of course, there was the fat suit.

Amanda knew from bitter, adolescent experience that the best way to stop people from seeing you was to be overweight. She had suffered a long time to learn that lesson. All through her teens she had been the butt of the jokes, left out of invitations and spurned by her peers, just because she had a weight problem. Behind the size she was actually quite attractive but they never knew because they never looked. They deemed her invisible. Talk about the elephant in the room!

But when she reached twenty one she inherited some money and used it to change her image and her identity. Not because she was unhappy with herself, but because she realised by then she would have to play by ‘their’ rules to win their game. And she had won. Her face appeared nightly on TV as a respected anchor-woman on a national news programme. Every one of her old tormentors could see her now. She was relishing her triumph and planned to crown it with a visit to each of them to point out the error of their old ways.

Hence the disguise: the wig, the fake teeth and the fat suit made her look exactly like she did at school. That was the point. She wanted to make sure they knew who was responsible as she murdered them, one by one. It was the perfect disguise for the perfect crime. Only the victims could identify her and they did not live to tell tales. She had even been captured on security cameras a few times and earned herself the nickname of The Fat Slasher but no-one linked the obese image with the svelte news reader. She knew she would never be caught. She just had to remember not to laugh when she reported the latest killing to her eager viewers. 

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Three Word Monday is run by Steve Isaak. Each week he chooses three words and our challenge is to write a 600-word (maximum) story including all three.  This week's words were: coconut, gnash and deem.

Suspicious character

I am absolutely convinced that my neighbour is a mass murderer. It’s not that he’s threatening in any way, in fact quite the opposite. He is extremely quiet and keeps very much to himself. On the few occasions I have encountered him in the street he has always been polite and seems like a nice young man.

But that’s what the neighbours always say, isn’t it? After they find the bodies.

I owe this entirely to Sandra Davies whose thoughts about her own neighbour run along very different lines!
Thanks for the inspiration Sandra.

FFF55: Trade in

It’s just a car, he kept thinking. You’ll get over it. He’d owned the Jaguar a long time and this felt like losing a friend. But it was time for it to go. It had served its purpose. Gloves on, he pushed the car off the bridge with his dead wife in the driver’s seat.

Since the writings's now on the Jobbing Writer Blog Wall I'm moving the Friday Flash Fiction over here from MorningAJ. If you want to know more about this weekly challenge to tell a story in exactly 55 words, call in at the G-Man's blog and see what other people have to offer. They're good!